Cortex is a hypermedia REST API for e-commerce. What makes Cortex unique is that it uses hypermedia links to associate related resources together rather than relying on resource URLs like most other e-commerce APIs. Much like website links, our hypermedia links allow you to explore the API and discover what resources are needed to build e-commerce features in your application.

Using links, we've designed a set of hypermedia controls that enable you to capture selections and data from the shopper. For more information on these controls, see forms, selectors, and needinfo. Cortex also comes bundled with Cortex Studio, our API exploration tool, which visually renders these controls so you can easily explore the API.

Cortex is built around REST and uses standard HTTP conventions like HTTP methods to perform actions on resources and HTTP response codes to indicate errors. JSON is returned to describe resource states. Cortex is programming language agnostic and can be used with any programming language that implements an HTTP client.

Cortex is designed to work with a variety of authentication systems and comes bundled with a reference OAuth2 implementation for test purposes.